


Coelacanth

by SpicyCurryUdon



Category: LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works, Love Live! School Idol Project, Love Live! Sunshine!!
Genre: Gen, Horror, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 09:03:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11551950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpicyCurryUdon/pseuds/SpicyCurryUdon
Summary: I wish I had not investigated this matter. I could have just let sleeping dogs lie, enjoying the bliss of ignorance, yet I chose to unravel these inconceivable horrors not fit for the mind of a mere human, and that I cannot undo. Her death was a warning that should have been heeded.





	Coelacanth

**Author's Note:**

> cw: mentions of suicide

Some things, once learned, cannot possibly be unlearned. Now, surely you think I jest, as we have all experienced the exact opposite over the course of our studies, but believe me, certain things, once seen, can never be unseen. I wish I had not investigated this matter. I could have just let sleeping dogs lie, enjoying the bliss of ignorance, yet I chose to unravel these inconceivable horrors not fit for the mind of a mere human, and that I cannot undo. Her death was a warning that should have been heeded.

It all began on a peaceful summer day in the town of Uchiura - "within the seashore" - a modest village on Japan's coastal countryside, right next to the Pacific Ocean. I had just moved there a year ago from the big city of Tokyo. Originally, I went there with the distinct goal of finding renewed inspiration for my musical activities - which had been slightly impaired as of late - and thought that the serenity and proximity to nature the location offered would enable me to continue on my creative path. The town had but one high school, which, though sparsely populated, contained enough welcoming girls for me to befriend. It did not take long for me to settle into that social structure, and soon, me and eight other girls formed a group to sing and dance together, and I myself was chosen as the main composer for our songs. It was truly magnificient.

Though the participating girls were all peculiar in their own right, which bestowed upon our group a distinct uniqueness, only one of them truly stood out: Yoshiko Tsushima. She was a bright young girl, yet tended to dabble in the demonic arts. She always referred to herself as "Yohane, the fallen angel" and at home, she would spend her day performing satanic rituals, claiming she tried to summon ancient demons. Of course, none of us took her spiel seriously and disregarded it, considering it no more than a silly youthful antic that she would definitely be embarassed by once grew out of it.

But fate was not so kind. On that peaceful summer day, we got to know that Yoshiko Tsushima had died. The reports said she was found dead in her room. None of us were close enough to witness it in any way, shape, or form, since she lived a few miles away from our village, in the slightly larger town of Numazu. It hit all of us very hard, causing the direct disbandment of our group, but no one had an answer to the question why this had happened. The police said she purposely took her own life, but that appeared to be unlikely. No one had ever considered her of suicidal inclination; she was a cheerful, energetic young woman with a staggering amount of youthful vigor. Also, she was very much healthy, so such an unexpected death without a clear cause did not seem to be explicable by any stretch of the imagination.

It had been a month since she died. The other girls were still mourning her death - I was, too, but in contrast to the others, the piercing question of why this happened was nagging at me much harder. I had always been a calm, introspective person with a strong inclination towards making sense of the things, people and events around me, so I began investigating the matter on my own terms.

As her untimely death took place within her own bedroom, I considered it the most appropriate place to start my search. After the day's lessons were over, I took the omnibus to Numazu and went straight to her home. As was befitting of a girl her age, she still lived with her parents; I knew them, since I had visited her before, and they allowed me in when I declared I came to enter her room one last time to bid farewell to my late friend. Once I shut the door, I instantaneously began to carefully inspect everything inside the room, hoping to find something that could explain the recent events.

There were many things still scattered about - apparently no one had entered since she died, presumably because of the amount of grief and sadness that would inevitably flare up again. There were her queer costumes, her video camera, her summoning paraphernalia - but, at first glance, nothing out of the ordinary. I still remembered these things fondly - it reminded me of how she would sit in front of her camera in frilly black dresses, her hair adorned with an elegant black feather. The first thing that seemed to be of use was what I found when I crawled under her bed and reached all the way to the leftmost corner; I retrieved what looked like a slightly battered, thick notebook. When I opened it, I discovered it was a journal of sorts, which she presumably used to record everyday events. The oldest entries dated back to about two years ago. I started flipping through the pages. When I got to an entry about two months old, her handwriting got noticeably more jumbled; It was as though she was suffering some sort of tremor while writing. Looking at my wristwatch, I noticed I had already spent almost an hour in her room, so I quickly put her journal into my bag and made my exit in order to not raise any suspicion in front of her parents.

When I arrived at home, night had already fallen. During my ride, I grew increasingly curious about the journal's contents; what could possibly have happened? Perhaps there had occured some terrifying event that took from her the joy she had once found in life? Though then, she would have hardly gotten a chance to hide it, as most of the other members were certainly attentive enough as to notice it right away, averting anything drastic before it could happen.

I hardly greeted my family and went straight to my room. I carefully made sure I actually locked the door as I intended to; I would not tolerate any disturbances. I opened the journal and started to read. 

The beginning was exactly as trivial as I expected. That which was gained from the first glance did not deceive; she wrote about her friends, our group, and other everyday things and activities. I grew impatient and skipped forward, hungrily holding out for the irregularity that had caught my eye back at her house. After a short while, I got back to the entry that had startled me. The messiness of her writing made deciphering it a difficult task, but one that I desperately wanted to take on. 

Apparently, on that day, she had once again performed one of her rituals she was so notorious for as the sun started to set; and even though nothing in particular happened, as was the norm, she immediately felt something was amiss, though she could not quite name it. Regret was seeping through her words in a manner that sent a chill down my very spine, yet I forced myself to keep reading, as my curiosity had me determined to get to the very bottom of this tragedy.

Her faint suspicion that something was off proved to be accurate when she went to bed that night. She started dreaming vividly, akin to a veritable hallucination, and woke up one day later. And indeed, I do remember her having been absent from school around that time, though she claimed it was a mere cold that had forced her to lie down. Her parents had said so as well, though they mentioned she was feverishly tossing and turning in her sleep. Lifelike and terrific those dreams were, she wrote, but she merely remembered the way they felt - whenever she tried to recall details, they escaped her. 

The next, long paragraph contained a lengthy reflection of the time before that night, an attempt to track down what exactly caused that accursed happening, and it contained information that I deemed both interesting and chilling. During her research on the satanic and the occult, she had apparently stumbled upon the legends of an ancient, fallen god; a daemonic fish deity. In a book of unknown origin that she had found in a corner of the school library, it was written that it lives in her very hometown, and the more she read about it, what was merely a passing fancy gradually turned into a veritable obsession. She was not able to explain why she was drawn to it to such an extent, yet it behooved her to find out more.

The regret that her words were so laced with now became apparent with exhilarating clarity. She had not been able to sleep anymore, and she had not wanted to sleep, lest nightmares would haunt her; and apparently she had become too exhausted to keep writing, as the entry abruptly ended in the middle of a sentence.

I wondered how Yoshiko was able to keep up such a convincing facade over the last month of her short life, and started to marvel at the strength of her spirit. Then, I realized the forbidden book she wrote about might still be in our school's library, and I resolved to go read it the next day. I had always been a materialist, and I did not believe in any deity; I like to think that part of me desperately wanted to disprove any connections to the supernatural, yet it is more probable that at this point, my growing morbid curiosity needed to be sated.

The next day, I went to school a bit earlier than usual in order to search the library undisturbed. Finding the book was unexpectedly effortless; it had been safely stored between two shelves in a way that made it easy to miss it if one was not looking for it specifically.

It was a huge tome that, albeit heavily aged, looked impressive and slightly foreboding. While the cover was a navy blue color, the picture printed on it was shining in gold and stood out, akin to a relief. It looked like a carving of a scene where something that resembled a fish was feasting off of something. The book was a bit damaged, so I could not make out what exactly it might have been that the creature was devouring.

I opened it and started to read. I did not read it thoroughly; even though I desperately wanted to believe that Yoshiko's fate could by no means have been caused by something like a book, a superstitious feeling of worry prevented me from really diving into it. I started to realize why Yoshiko was driven to madness, though, as not being sucked in could only be done with considerable effort. 

It was written that aeons ago, a naval being came upon the lands of today's Numazu. Enormous, blue-scaled, with fins it could move like legs, it came out of the water and trod upon the shore. The people of ancient Numazu were absolutely mesmerized and revered it as a god, sacrificed to it women, men, children and cattle alike; by its mere presence, it established its own cult. They gave it the name of what can only be rendered as "Coelacanth". A map drawn on one page marked the village close to the shore, north of the Numazu Deep Sea Aquarium.

I did not manage to read any further, as suddenly, I was interrupted by a student entering the library. I quickly put the book back in its original spot and left. I was still not convinced that this whole ordeal was more than mere fiction, so I decided to seek out the marked spot as soon as I possibly could. When the school day was over, I dashed home and planned my trip; I would tell my family that I was staying over at a friend's house for the night and took the last omnibus to Numazu in the early evening; I packed some money so I could take a cab home later.

I arrived at Numazu when the sun started to set, and when I got to the aquarium, it was already dark. I navigated towards the marked point; it seemed as though the further I advanced, the narrower the roads and the steeper the slope became. I soon reached a plateau, a small, grassy area, surrounded by abandoned houses. The whole geometry of the place seemed to be slightly off, as the houses looked like they were bending forward, backward, sidewise, which made me feel uneasy in a way that I can still not explain; and in the middle of the plateau lay a big stone slab that seemed to be covering something.

I instinctively went towards said slab, kneeling down and trying to push it forward, and even though it was massive, the dew on the grass enabled me to move it. The moon, at once so hideously gibbous, shone its light upon the plateau and enabled me to see what I had just revealed; an entrance where a particularly mossy, irregular flight of stairs led down into the darkness. Propelled forward by my conviction to disprove what science could not explain, I vigilantly made my descent.

I don't know how long I descended, as I had completely lost track of time. When the staircase ended, it transitioned into a narrow tunnel that seemed to lead into something like a hall. Upon entering it, I saw that it was enourmous. Even when I fetched my electric light and pointed it directly upward, I could not see its ceiling, and it seemed to stretch endlessly forward and sideways. I looked at the walls and saw that runes were written on it; they looked like cave paintings, yet the style resembled the things I saw in the book. People dancing around that huge fish from the cover, rituals and sacrifices, they were all documented on those walls. I went further into the hall and stumbled upon what could only have been the remains of enourmous stone houses of cyclopean masonry, completely abandoned and forgotten for what must have been an eternity.

The silence that had been uninterrupted ever since I went up those roads to the plateau was suddenly broken by something faint in the distance; without thinking, I made my way to the apparent origin of the sound. I was now close enough to make out what it was - it now sounded like breathing, or wheezing. I walked further and suddenly, the source was right before my eyes. 

It must have been the darkness and the relative weakness of my light that made me unable to see it earlier, but now it towered before me menacingly. It was tall, unbelievably tall, scaly and stared at me with dead, green eyes. It was undoubtedly Coelacanth, and it had noticed me. I stood there, paralyzed in fear, akin to a hare in front of a snake. Then it growled, growled in a way that could easily drive a man to madness, and crawled forward with its fins. 

I instantly grew unbearably fearful, turned my back and started to run. In the midst of my frenzy, I tripped and fell; my right hand grabbed onto something soft and I held on to it as I clenched my fist and ran. Driven by instinct, I found the exit, ran back through the tunnel, up the mossy stairs, frantically pushed the slab back onto the entrance and ran down those unnaturally steep roads. I don't know how long it took me, but somehow, I arrived at a point where I could see the aquarium's lights in the distance.

Believe me, what I saw was enough to drive someone into the state of despair and regret that I'm now in, but that was not it; the thing that horrified me the most and still makes me fear for my own life is what I saw next.

For when I opened my right hand to see what I had grabbed onto, it held a single, large black feather.

**Author's Note:**

> I have been a fan of H.P. Lovecraft's stories for a long time, and this is my tribute. Thank you for reading!


End file.
